The weather is hot and sticky... so I watched the NBA Draft instead

Okay, for my 1st real post, I decided to talk about the first round of the NBA draft.
I knew I had to do some blog coverage of the event when the night before the draft, I saw Jay Bilas describe Marvin Williams as "bouncy".
I don't know why, but I just thought that was hilarious.
As a whole, I would say that this class is overall pretty deep, but very unspectacular at the top. And after Bogut, there are absolutely no big men, unless you count Sean May and all of his chins and tits. Well, here are my thoughts and some of my favorite moments of the 1st round:

- Let's start with Bogut - Pretty low risk/medium reward guy. Perfect for the Bucks. But why was his eyesight an issue? Honestly. They've made incredible advances in the field of optometry lately and as much as I'd like to see a 7 foot Aussie/Croat wearing Kurt Rambis style glasses, I just don't think its gonna happen. And he's a fucking center for crying out loud. Its not like this guy's specialty is the 40 foot jumper

- With all the talk about historically ugly suits on the draftees, I think Greg Anthony was just getting into the mood of the draft when he decided to wear the hideous combination of a brown pinstriped suit, a white shirt, and a flourescent orange tie.
- There should be an NBA draft drinking game called "Bottoms Upside". Anytime the words "upside" or "potential" are uttered, take a shot. (If you survive past the lottery picks, you have an iron liver.)

- After I wrote the above sentence, Dick Vitale actually said this: "This guy's got great upside AND tremendous potential!"

- Okay, I grew up loving the Atlanta Hawks with every fiber of my being. Wilkins, Webb, Willis, Koncak. Those were my guys (inexplicably). I stopped rooting for them a long time ago, but I still feel really bad for their fans. What a nightmare of a franchise. I mean, they've totally overachieved the last few years and its killing them. I mean, on paper, they've been one of the worst 2 or 3 teams in the league for what seems like 10 years. Yet they almost never get a top 5 pick. And on top of that, they make the absolute worst selections in the entire league. And remember, the Clippers are still part of the NBA. Take a look at Atlanta's first round draft history of late:

2004 - (6) Josh Childress, (17) Josh Smith
2003 - (21) Boris Diaw-Riffiod
2002 - Don't have a 1st rd. pick - get Dan Dickau, the last pick in the 1st round for a future 1st round pick. Now I love the big Dickau, but think about the logic of that trade: 28th pick for a Hawks 1st round pick (which will NEVER be near 28th)
2001 - (3) Pau Gasol - immediately traded for S-A Rahim
2000 - (6) DerMarr Johnson
1999 - (10) Jason Terry, (17) Cal Bowdler, (20) Dion Glover, (27) Jumaine Jones (immediately traded for a future 1st rounder)
1998 - (20) Roshown McLeod
1997 - (22) Ed Gray
1996 - (28) Priest Lauderdale
1995 - (16) Alan Henderson
1994 - No 1st round picks
1993 - (15) Doug Edwards
1992 - (10) Adam Keefe

Whooa!!! Slow down!!! I'm having a hard time counting all the All-Star game appearances!
Now granted, there were some weak drafts in there, but you would think sooner or later, SOMEONE would have panned out for the Hocks. For their sake, lets hope Starvin Marvin is as bouncy as Bilas thinks he is.

- Martell Webster's grandmother wore what looked like half of a chef's hat. Even Tirico had to point it out.

- And speaking of Martell Webster, is there a worse environment for a rich 18 year old kid than the Portland Trail Blazers? "Oh no! my kid's in a gang! Oh no! My kid's on the Trail Blazers!" I mean, as a parent, which is worse?

- Everyone's head exploded when the Raptors picked Villanueva, and I kinda have to agree with them. I thought Stephen A. Smith was going to throw something. Speaking of Stephen A., anyone got the over/under on when exactly he's gonna have an on-camera meltdown? It's gonna happen, I'm just not sure when.

- Its official. Knicks fans are just booing their pick out of habit.

- Stern was hilarious, as always. For example, for the 3rd pick he paused for almost 10 seconds before calling Deron Williams' name. I thought sure he was about to butcher the pronunciation of some European guy's name. The highlight of the entire evening came when Rashad McCants was picked, went up onstage only to find the Commish staring off into space. McCants then proceeded to sneak up behind Stern and tap him on the shoulder so that they could get the requisite picture taken together. BEHIND YOU!!!

- I think after about the 12th pick ESPN just stopped showing Jay Bilas' BEST AVAILABLE LIST since it was painfully obvious that his rankings had nothing to do with what was going on in the draft.

- Hakim Warrick loves Cookie Crisp. Thank you, quality ESPN journalism.

- Jerry West thought Warrick was "awfully good at Princeton".

- Fran Vazquez looks like a miniature Gheorge Muresan. And he's 6' 10".

- For the record, every draft should have a 5 minute 1st round clock and a 2 minute 2nd round clock.

- Charlotte's GM called in sick so the Bobcats marketing and sales departments had to make their picks.

- I hate Dick Vitale.

- Jay Bilas described every single forward in the draft as "long". I'm serious.

- The most surprising moment in the 1st round: the Spurs drafting a European with the 28th pick.

- Now obviously, the NBA draft isn't the biggest basketball player allocation event of the week. (Its just the only one televised and the only one where I might get to hear Stephen A. Smith say "Slava Medvedenko".) That honor of course goes to today's announcement from Greg Oden & Mike Conley, Jr. regarding where they plan on attending college. Now all indications are that they're both choosing Ohio State, but I'm not gonna flip out until after they actually announce it. Hypothetically though, this COULD be the Bucks' greatest recruiting class of all time, and thus, fucking awesome. Oden, Cook, Lighty, and Conley, Jr. are ranked 1, 6, 12, and 20 in their class in the nation. But again. Eggs. Counting. Hatching.

The last post on “Star Wars,” I promise

Okay, I saw Revenge of the Sith, so this little project has come to a somewhat merciful end. The thing is, I didn’t really care enough about it one way or the other to post an ass-humpingly-huge review of it, as I have done for the previous entries -- but I will give a few thoughts. Ever since I saw it, when people have asked me what I thought of the film, I always respond the same way: "It was as good as George Lucas could make it." Quite simply, I don’t think much of the man as a storyteller, and, completely unsurprisingly, I found that I basically agreed 100% with a little review done by Sarah Bunting, one of the co-creators of TWoP. She explains much better and more eloquently than I could, what worked (most of the denouement montage) and didn’t quite work (the part where Vader, upon being told of Padme’s death, bellows "Noooooo!") about Sith, and why. Do yourself a minor favor and check it out. Overall, I found Sith to be a fairly enjoyable, mildly confounding, and ultimately relatively satisfying end to a series of movies that ... I ... I have just seen too many times. I mean, I’m a guy who noticed and appreciated a CGI Peter Cushing at the end of the movie, for Christ’s sake. There is 1 kind of person who gets that reference: a Nerd.

It was fun ... kind of ... while it lasted

Bummer. Series tied 3-3, with the game tied at 57 going into the fourth quarter of game 7. Not sure you can find two more evenly-matched teams. These two teams square off for 20 games, odds are they would finish with a 10-10 split. The thing that jumped up and bit the Pistons was the thing that everyone pointed out as their main weakness all year: sometimes the guys just can’t shoot straight. In the fourth quarter last night, Rasheed was like 3-5, and the rest of the team was something like 3-14. That was the difference.

Although, you could really make a strong argument that the difference last night, and in the series as a whole, was 3-point shooting. Last night the Pistons were 2-for-14, while the Spurs went 7-for-11. In the seven games combined, the Spurs outscored the Pistons from behind the arc ... get ready ... 153-54. That’s an average of 14 more points per game coming from threes. If that ain’t the whole story, it’s damn near it.

But hey, hats off to the Spurs. They got it done when it mattered. Tim Duncan avoided an entire offseason of hearing about why he was a choker. I guess of all the Western Conference teams, I could probably live with the Pistons losing to the Spurs more than I could handle them losing to anyone else. They’re a great team, and Popovich is a great coach and a class act. Now, the Pistons just have to find somebody who can come off the bench and actually put the ball in the basket once in a while...

Question

How...

... in the name ...

... of all that is holy ...

DO YOU LEAVE ROBERT FUCKING HORRY WIDE OPEN WITH THE GAME ON THE LINE?!?!?!?!?

Fuck.

You're lame

You know, Mr. Fu, I checked out your links. I've see and acted in amish porn, been there done that. Boring!! And the clock...totally lame. If you wanna see an AWESOME clock (awesome cross?), check out this one. However, the arabians sure know how to treat the ladies.

Thoughts after two games

1.) The Spurs are an incredible team. Before the conference finals were over, I told the D-Man that I thought the Pistons would have a better chance against the Suns than the Spurs; and prior to the start of this series, I told The Diddy that I was terrified of San Antonio (Holmes). Why? For the same reason the vast majority of the national media picked the Spurs: they do everything the Pistons do, except they score a little more and they have Tim Duncan. Dids agreed, but D thought I was crazy. Well, there have not been many times where I’ve felt worse about being completely correct about something. They’re outplaying the Pistons in every facet of the game.

2.) The officiating in this series has been laughably one-sided thus far. I’m not saying there’s any agenda or conspiracy, nor am I saying that it’s the reason the Pistons are losing. I’m just saying that, through two games, damn near every single "could go either way" call has gone against Detroit. It bears mentioning that this mistreatment by officials may be something of a self-fulfilling prophecy, in that the Pistons’ excessive whining may have been the impetus for some refs to (consciously or unconsciously) decide to always make calls in the opponent’s favor. At any rate, the one-sided officiating has just been one more thing to get frustrated about in this series.

3.) Much more annoying has been the team’s reaction to not getting the benefit of any calls. The whining is incessant, and, if you look around and see what the national media is saying about this series, it’s almost entirely about the Pistons being crybabies and whatnot. Quite frankly, it’s embarrassing: this team has built its reputation on hard work and grittiness - the whole "going to work" marketing blitz. Now they’re acting like a bunch of whiners, and, as I noted above, the worst part about it is that they’re getting the reputation of being a bunch of crybabies, which affects the way people in general and -- more importantly -- the officials, look at them.

4.) While I don’t believe there’s any conspiracy in place, I think it’s ludicrous the way that everyone is dismissing the possibility of the Spurs getting the benefit of an unfair number of calls. This is the NBA we’re talking about! You can say what you want about how you think that type of thing is unlikely, but I know what I’ve seen: I paid attention during the Michael Jordan era, and I watched Game 6 of the 2002 Western Conference finals and Game 3 of the Lakers/T-Wolves series in ‘03. This kind of thing happens. Again, I’m not saying that there’s an agenda here, at least there wasn’t at first (see #2), and I’m not saying it’s the reason the Pistons are losing. In my opinion, even if the Pistons were the ones getting the majority of the bad calls, they would still be down 2-0. But to blithely deny that this kind of thing is even possible from the NBA is, in my opinion, shortsighted and unaware. But here’s some information that’s worth seeing: apparently, yesterday Larry Brown pointed out that, thus far in the playoffs, in games officiated by a crew including Danny Crawford and Ron Garretson, the Pistons are 1-7. In games officiated by any other crew, Detroit is 11-1. Warrants mentioning. It’s also notable, as was pointed out in Detroit sports columnist Terry Foster’s blog, that Game 2 on Sunday featured an extraordinarily odd box score, considering the game’s result. Consider the following:

The Pistons made 4 more field goals than the Spurs. They attempted 82 shots from the floor, vs. 62 attempts by the Spurs.

The Spurs attempted 38 2-pt. field goals, while the Pistons attempted 76 2-pt. shots, twice as many as the Spurs.

The Spurs had 24 3-pt. field goal attempts, while the Pistons only shot 6 threes.

The Pistons attempted 16 FT's, while the Spurs attempted 34. Given that the Spurs attempted so many 3-pointers, it's hard to imagine how they would wind up with so many FT attempts compared to the Pistons. Particularly interesting was that Chauncey, as much as he handled the ball, had only one free throw, vs. 13 for Ginobili.

The Pistons had 18 offensive rebounds, vs. 9 for the Spurs. Total rebounds were 45 for the Pistons, and 36 for the Spurs.

Just strange, that’s all. The Pistons certainly have to shoot better (Rip is shooting 33% for the series, and Tayshaun 26%), defend better ... just basically play much better tonight than they did in the first two games. If they don’t, this sucker is gonna be over before it’s even started.

"Star Wars" and NERRRDDS, again

Well, I said I’d talk about all of the damn "Star Wars" movies, so in the interest of completeness, I’ve still got Episodes I and II to go before seeing and reviewing "Revenge of the Sith." Now, the way I feel would be most appropriate for reviewing these atrocities, especially in light of my long-winded entries on the original trilogy, would be thus:


-The Phantom Menace-

Sucks.


-Attack of the Clones-

Sucks worse.


But that's a little too brief. However, because of how much I disliked these movies, I’m still keeping things much shorter than I did for the original trilogy. And I’m sure we’re all happy about that.


-The Phantom Menace-

Probably the most disappointed I’ve ever been while leaving a theater. Just a colossal misfire on just about every front imaginable. After seeing this movie, I instantly remembered that it was the first movie Lucas had directed since the original Star Wars - not the trilogy, but the first movie - and I figured that we had an obvious reason why. He just wasn’t very good at it. Too talky, too obvious (that fucking "pod race" had "video game opportunity" written all over it), too ... well, just too stupid. I mean, I know that even the original Star Wars movies were basically kids flicks, but those seemed to be aimed more at hyperactive 13- and 14-year olds, not the 6- and 7-year olds who seem to be the primary audience for Phantom. Plus, I may be the only one who feels this way, but I find the fact that every single damn thing in these movies is obviously computer-generated to be quite distracting. These computer drawings are not actors, and not only do they not behave and respond as well as actors do, but a significant amount of the time they don’t even look particularly real.

The casting is uniformly pretty brilliant - I love Liam Neeson and Ewan McGregor, even though neither is given anything particularly interesting to do. And casting Natalie Portman and Samuel L. Jackson was a further startlingly salient effort at making the Star Wars saga more palatable to today’s audiences (although it must be said: any time Samuel L. is involved, and he’s NOT saying "motherfucker" at some point in your flick, it’s just a wasted opportunity. Warrants mentioning). The problem, as is the case with both Episode I and Episode II, is that the actors are hamstrung by extraordinarily stupid and tedious dialogue. Lucas has often admitted that he’s much more concerned with the visuals in his movies than the dialogue, and quite frankly, he didn’t need to tell us. It’s incredibly obvious. Ugh, I’m getting to the point where I’m about to start talking about the laughably misguided character Jar Jar Binks, and what hasn’t been said about that catastrophe? So I’m just going to stop now. Except to say that I strongly suspect that Natalie Portman spent this entire movie trying to talk like a robot. Like Nicole Kidman in that old SNL skit where she’s a little kid on a playground with Mike Myers: "I am talking like a robot. This is how a robot talks, and I am talking like a robot." It would be funny, if it weren’t so ... no, it was funny.

Final rating: 2 out of 5


-Attack of the Clones-

Jesus, where do I start? This movie was actually, literally difficult for me to sit through. This is probably the most dialogue-heavy of the "prequels," and, considering what I said earlier about Lucas’s ability to write quality text ... well, the number of times I cringed due to hilariously awful dialogue was roughly proportional to the number of times I checked the clock to see if the damn thing was almost over. Which was A LOT.

Even the action scenes seem perfunctory, like they’re just ambling along with no real purpose, no end to justify the shooting and cutting and blowing up. Lucas’s "hey, look at this"-itis is obviously in full bloom. Pretty CGI portraits may do the trick for some people, but I, for one, just don’t care. Give me something in your story to care about - I don’t get a huge kick out of "oohing" and "ahhing" special effects. Plus, as I said before, a lot of the time, the stuff looks fake anyways. Unfortunately, this movie has little going for it other than the visuals. McGregor acquits himself well again, but again, Portman seems lost in a sea of painful dialogue. Newcomer Hayden Christenson, playing a teenaged Anakin, is just brutal in this film. I like the guy, and he was great in "Shattered Glass," but here, he’s so bad that almost every time he opens his mouth it’s a cringeworthy moment. Christopher Lee -- who is ALWAYS awesome -- adds a little bit of a sinister edge as Count Dooku (the dumbest name in a film series chock full of idiotic monikers), but I mean, he’s like 85 years old. His lightsaber duels are an awkward amalgam of closeups of Lee’s face and long shots with an obvious stunt double. But hey, I’m nitpicking, so I’ll move on to some bigger problems I have.

My biggest problem with the "prequels" has been Lucas’s lack of adherence to the internal logic he has set up for the series. I can handle leaps of faith and suspension of disbelief - it’s when movies are untrue to their own rules and conditions that I get upset. For instance, one of my favorite movies of the last few years was "The Ring," which scared the holy living hell out of me. Notice that I have completely bought into the fact, inside the universe of this movie, that a little girl can come out of TVs and kill you for watching a videotape. But the thing is, among the myriad other problems with the gawd-awful sequel, I was severely annoyed by the fact that, all of a sudden in the second film, the little girl had the ability to friggin’ possess people! Why the fuck wasn’t she doing it in the first movie? They just added something because they thought it would be cool, with no regard for the "rules" that were set up by the first movie. I find that Lucas does this in his "prequels," and it drives me insane. Of course, I’m the type of person who lets small things like these infuriate me, but you all knew that already. That’s just the way I am. What types of things drive me nuts? Well, advancing computer animation techniques have allowed Lucas to put into the "prequels" many more detailed and varied technological gizmos inhabiting the Star Wars world. The thing is, the original trilogy was heavy on natural settings and creatures. What I’m trying to say is, because his second trilogy is supposedly happening before the original three movies, the technology IN the Star Wars universe seems much more advanced in the past than it is in the future. For instance, if they have the technology to make an entire goddamn army out of droids in "Phantom" and "Clones," then why the hell not use them 30-some-odd years later, or whenever the hell the original trilogy takes place? And yes, it drives me crazy that he’s turned Yoda into this whirling dervish of a warrior, when in the first trilogy you get the sense that he’s this very wise, very powerful, yet almost completely decrepit, Jedi master. So, we know that Yoda is about 900 years old in Jedi. We can estimate that the events that happen in Clones took place about 25-35 years before the events of Jedi. So, Yoda is apparently a Tazmanian Devil-like fighting wiz at the age of 870, but gosh, it’s those last 30 years that kill you, and he’s become a frail little goblin all of a sudden by Empire and Jedi. This is just one example of Lucas and company deciding to go with "what looks cool" instead of "what makes sense." That’s what I’m talking about. Am I strange and unusual for feeling this way? Probably. But hey, I’m used to being strange and unusual.

(By the way, here is a fantastic IMDb post that talks about Lucas going back and changing the original trilogy. He presents great arguments "for" and "against"... and then he blows the "for" arguments out of the water. Worth a read, for the thought and effort put into it.)

Final rating: 1 1/2 out of 5

Quick story

So yesterday, as I was walking through downtown Detroit, as I am wont to do, I was approached, as they are often wont to do, by a homeless man. Now, this happens about one out of every 4 trips downtown for me, which is a little lower frequency than I would expect. But that’s neither here nor there. The point is, the guy asked me if I had any money to help him get on the bus (I now assume that by "money" he meant "dollar bills," and by "on the bus" he meant "a fifth of Jack Daniel’s"). So I told the guy I’d give him whatever I had in my pockets, as I often do when asked this question downtown. He seemed okay with this. So I reached in, pulled out the contents of my left pocket, and examined them. "All I have is 22 cents," I told him, and dropped the coins into his already-outstretched hands. Now, a scenario like this has happened countless times before. But this time was slightly different, because Mr. Homeless Guy actually snorted incredulously at me, like I was somehow withholding something from him. I was semi-flabbergasted by this, and kicked myself afterward for not saying something along the lines of "You know what, I’ve decided that I want that 22 cents back. You obviously have no need for it anyway, judging by the incredulous manner in which you accepted my FUCKING ACT OF CHARITY." But I didn’t, partly because I was already walking away, but mostly because I’m not that quick a thinker. Durrrrrrr.

Pistons-Heat Game 7: A Day Later

Well, somewhat predictably, not even an hour after the game ended, the "Miami would have won this game if Dwyane Wade would have been healthy!" bandwagon left the station. And picked up steam. And was a big topic on ESPN and numerous sportsradio shows today. Even the MWB's own Todd "The Diddy" Hykes told me that Miami would have won if Wade had been 100%. He then asked me if I felt the same way, and I replied with a resounding...

"I don't know."

Because I don't. And really, neither does anyone else. But the speculation will happen, nonetheless. It always does. But I really think it's shitty to try and play the "Detroit was lucky to win, because Wade wasn't healthy" card, and I have a few answers to that claim, culled from a few local doofs and, somewhat shockingly, Bill Simmons (who only partially-jokingly picked Miami to win by 28 yesterday).

1.) This Pistons team was built to avoid situations like what Miami just went through. When you rely that heavily on 1 or 2 superstars, an injury, even one that still allows the star(s) to play, can murder your team. Last year, Rasheed Wallace played the entire playoffs with Plantar Fasciitis that limited everything he could do. Sure, he played every game, but people seem to forget that he was only marginally effective in the Conference Finals and Finals (except for Game 4 of the Finals, when he took over late in the fourth because he was eating Slava Medvedenko alive on the block). Because of the Pistons' balance, and the way the team was constructed, Wallace was able to just kind of blend in and not have to do too much while the other guys did the heavy lifting. Simply put, Damon Jones, Keyon Dooling, Eddie Jones, and Rasual Butler couldn't do that kind of lifting. Putting all your eggs in the "Shaq and Dwy-ane will carry the rest of our crappy players" basket makes you extremely vulnerable to injuries. Instead of screaming "you got lucky," maybe people should be giving credit to Joe Dumars.

2.) And this is related to 1.) -- Because of the tremendous load that Wade had to bear in almost literally carrying those other stiffs through the regular season and into the Conference Finals, it seems like his body just kind of gave out once it hit the 95-game mark. Say what you want about the Pistons not really playing hard until they absolutely have to -- and believe me, I will, in the next point -- but it's undeniable that they (rightly or wrongly) have saved themselves for what they've felt were the biggest moments all year. They paced themselves and brought out the big guns when they needed them. On the other hand, Wade's body fell apart after carrying his team for six months of the regular season, as well as about 2 heavily-burdensome weeks of the playoffs without Shaq. Should the Pistons be criticized for this? Their team, of the course of the season, was constructed a little bit better than Miami's. What's so awful about them moving on? Oh, that's right. They don't have Shaq, who has clearly become the single most beloved athlete in the entire sport.

3.) The Pistons, although it drives me completely crazy, have exhibited a nasty habit of not playing with any intensity whenever their backs weren't against the wall, and coming out like gangbusters when it seemed that their season might actually have been on the line. I hate it, but they've played up and down to their competition all year. So is it really that unreasonable to think that they might have raised their level of play had Wade been completely healthy? Just something to think about.

4.) As Simmons said: the Pistons possibly would have beaten the '87 Celtics if Adrian Dantley and Vinnie Johnson hadn't cracked heads and had to leave the game in Game 7, and they almost definitely would have won the '88 title if Isiah hadn't sprained his ankle in Game 6. So if anyone was due for a break of "the best opposing player suffering a debilitating injury right as his team was taking control of the series" caliber, it was the Detroit Pistons.

5.) And the number one, biggest, most foolproof answer to the "Detroit wouldn't have won if Wade had been healthy" bullshit:

WHO THE FUCK CARES?

The Pistons are in the finals for the second year in a row. How much is whining that Wade wasn't 100% healthy gonna change that? Not one goddamn bit.

Although I'm terrified of the Spurs.

And speaking of the Spurs, here's a nice little Tim Duncan piece, for shits and giggles.

THEN THE DAY IS MINE!!!

Huh-HAW.

Do you know what today is? Do you? DO YOU?

It is the beginning of that most holiest of weekends, where the Cuervo flows like beer, the Flaming-O gets humped, and the shmulligans taste like shmulligans. How many shots will Phil take? How many strokes will Jeff take to finish the round? How many strokes will Evan take in order to hit the nut flush? WE WILL FIND OUT, STARTING TONIGHT.

Also, go Pistons.


HUZZAH!!!

The depressing story continues

Well, I’m pretty sure that we at the MWB have yet to speak out on one of the most tragic turns of events in recent memory: Lindsay Lohan’s descent from busty It-girl to waif-like Lara Flynn Boyle impersonator. I don’t even have the heart to link to any pictures of Lohan 2.0 - they’re all over if you look for them, and besides that, it’s just too damn depressing. Oh, fine, just one: I guess this is the kind of thing a massive coke habit will get you.

In further Lohan news, Disney has apparently decided to digitally reduce the newly-blonde non-bombshell’s bosoms in her upcoming "film" "Herbie: Fully Loaded." The folks at Disney say that they made the move in order to "avoid offending family audiences." I don’t understand that at all - I mean, YOU GUYS hired her, and if a chick has a ginormous rack, she’s got a ginormous rack, that’s just the way it is, and I don’t see why the actress herself needs to be digitally edited. The only thing I can think of is that the camerawork in some of the scenes (like the "jumping up and down at the racetrack" one referenced in the press release) must have been slightly, um ... lascivious. Which, let’s face it, is pretty damn understandable, at least with Lohan 1.0. Oh, and a plastic surgery expert has come forward with an opinion that I’ve had for quite some time, ever since LL was "hospitalized" for "exhaustion" shortly after filming on "Herbie" concluded, only to resurface afterward with noticeably smaller breatseses. Here’s what I’m figuring went down: in summer/fall of ‘03, Lohan was a cute little ingenue, but she was a little smallish in the chestal area. Some big work was starting to come her way, and she decided to get the twins enhanced a little bit. But then, as can happen with teenage girls, the yazoombas kept on growing, and they were soon hefty to the point of being outlandish. Which was, admittedly, awesome. But then they were probably a little too unmanageable, and her hospital stay for "exhaustion" was a cover for her implant removal procedure [/conspiracy theory]. And now she looks like a lollipop, with her twig-like body resting a head-sized head atop its jagged shoulders. Just thinking about it makes me want to kill myself.

Oh, and in semi-Lohan-related news, I had a nightmare last night, a principal feature of which was that every single female in my life had inexplicably had sex with Wilmer Valderrama. Every single female I know: my mom, my sister, my girlfriend, girls that I just know from law school, friggin’ everybody. All of them. They were all just kind of casually like "Oh yeah, I’ve totally done Wilmer, too." His pact with Satan has apparently spread into my dreams now. Goodie.